Appalachia: You can’t get there from here

Appalachia: You can’t get there from here

There are many competing and overlapping definitions of Appalachia. In the larger U.S. culture, the one birthed by local color fiction in late 19th Century popular national magazines struck root. While this prototype has mutated, its many iterations still largely dictate to the wider U.S. imagination what supposedly really ranks as Appalachia.

Concurrent with these serial pieces on lost “mountain ancestors,” another perhaps even more foretelling story for Appalachia was propagandized. Unlike the serials’ tales of salt-of-the-earth, clannish, feuding, poor, white, uneducated, male, moonshining hillbillies, the pamphlets and journals promoted by South-of-the-Mason-Dixon land speculators used science and statistics to sell domestic and European investors on their section of Appalachia as an untapped reserve ripe to experience the fiscal prosperity of the industrializing U.S. North.

In short order, the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan financiers on earth (for example, J.P. Morgan), poured money into Appalachia and bought massive land-holdings, propped up “coal barons” to carve out mines and towns in a romanticized Eastern version of the “Wild West,” finagled in railroads, secured indefinite federal fiscal incentives, dispersed recruiters down South and abroad to lure in tens of thousands of cheap laborers and fueled two energy sectors: coal and oil.

The high demand for labor in the first seventy-coal-producing-years buttressed a new coal-centered network of towns, and thus, a coal-centered culture was dug in. Here, the collective coal industry reigned as King. Coalprovided that section of Appalachia with massive employment until the introduction of the continuous miner machine in the mid-1950s. Within five years, automation cut the need for actual human coal workers by half. Since then, employment with King Coal has continued to fall, generally due to technology or pricing displacement.

Yet, here we still find ourselves in the 21st Century with a mountain-bred white coal miner as the larger U.S culture’s standard-bearing Appalachian. Like anywhere, the facts on the ground are more complex. In short, what other Appalachians are there? And from this prototype Appalachian, can we even get to those Appalachians from here?

Like most any “region” or state, Appalachia is a political and a created place, patched together largely by business people, politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and academics. With respect to the latter, Appalachian Studies pieces together an Appalachia through a range of historic, literary, musical, political, sociological, artisan, artistic and theological lineages and line-ups. That field also brings us an Appalachia of exploitation, labor uprisings, internal imperialism, externalized environmental costs, sacrifice zones: a place discarded, corrupt, abused, with towns, people and landscapes left for dead.

Tracing contemporary Appalachia, geologists track and appraise every square inch for its mineral potential. Biological systems engineers assess its rich water resources. Reclamation scientists work to turn Appalachia’s many rural industrial brownfields and surface mined sites into utilitarian spaces of rewilding or supposed economically beneficial use, one that may create a job or two.

One of a couple of U.S. regions to rank its own federal-state partnership commission — the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), the ARC’s Appalachia crams in places as disparate as most of Pennsylvania, the upper half of Alabama, the solidly Piedmont city of Winston-Salem, a section of Georgia north of Atlanta, the large section of eastern West Virginia whose hundreds of thousands of acres of gas fields rights were most recently owned by the democratic socialist Norwegian government and five southern West Virginia “coal” counties recently deemed to be in a Great Depression. What prompted the ARC’s Appalachia came about through a “discovery” in the 1960s that these contiguous places at that time lagged behind the rest of the U.S. in terms of economic growth.

More recently, if not homebound by mesothelioma or other reasons, former Appalachian coal miners have gone into trucking or moved to cities to take up construction, or moved north or west to work in oil and gas. In much of Appalachia now, like most of the U.S., if employed, you are likely to be working in medical or retail; if in the most rural counties, then you most likely work for the county itself or the state. However, in terms of how we think of ourselves in Appalachia as a physical risk-taking, hell-raising, hard-working macho people who can take a lot, “nursing family,” “Dollar General family,” or “county road worker family” just doesn’t evoke the same gut reaction as “mining family.” As the economic possibilities in Appalachia continue to shift, we’ll see if reaching back 140 years before coal to become again a “farm family” or if being a “recreational tourism family” can evoke that mining kind of solidarity or family pride.

In the early 1990s East Tennessee State’s Now and Then magazine featured a survey of who considered themselves Appalachian first, before a state or other regional affiliation. Bluefield, West Virginia topped that list, a hamlet that exploded during the reign of King Coal into a significant industrial crossroads sporting a bustling freight yard, a historic Black College, its own minor league team, a hopping nightlife and a micropolitan culture rich with white mountain folk and sharecropper, African American and southern and Eastern European immigrant music, houses of worship, foods, businesses, socialites, strong bosses, organized crime, union organizers and workers–so much so that before its downturn after Black Tuesday 1929 Bluefield was deemed “Little New York.”

How does a little town with so much in common with the freewheeling rollicking Big Apple come to think of itself as Big Appalachia? Guess it makes as much sense as a patrician Playboy New Yorker reality TV star in a trucker hat. Or, that person’s palling around with a paisan, the Bobby Kennedy-supporting son of a Sing Sing tenured Brooklynite. And, the patrician and the paisan ending up a Republican president and mayor respectively. The fact is: Most people and most places have many layers and sides.

Moreover, maybe, this once little New York and these big New Yorkers aren’t so far from each other as Americans. To paraphrase Whitman, they both contain multitudes. It is those of us observing and reflecting or deflecting that have lost clear sight of each and their shared anxieties, pathologies, habits, hopes and dreams.

Crystal Cook Marshall is a contributor to ‘100 Days in Appalachia.’ She was photographed at the former Beaver High School in Bluefield where she and others have plans for renovation. (Photo: Nancy Andrews)

Appalachia too has been pigeonholed as a space separate from much of the rest of rural America, when in fact, many rural places share its same concerns: what to do economically and environmentally after the local single sector economy automates away jobs or dries up entirely; how to hold and create leaders where one industry has held the reigns of local power; how to shrink smart and make places livable for a declining population and in the face of local brownfields and blown out buildings; how to get past long held local and regional rivalries and find common ground for shared learning and sharing of resources; how to service and fund issues of health and addiction as workforce issues; how to follow and anticipate the next sources of local resources to be used by mainly outside investors and given those, how to shape and ensure more equitable accountability for land, economic, health and educational stewardship; how to support and connect economic sectors in which the jobs won’t be automated away and how to build the economic infrastructure for those without the massive federal and state underwriting, grants, tax incentives, research and development support, policy lobbying and university kowtowing wrangled by large-scale industries.

Sounds like plenty for a national level conversation on the rural and — for that matter — of the shared concerns of rural and urban America. Let this current examination of Appalachia set up a different popular media prototype–an Appalachia as a place where these quantifiable and qualifiable needs of the rural come into national profile and action.

We must stop hyper-exceptionalizing Appalachia and each other and instead connect rural and urban places across the country and the world in similar straits. We can learn and become more together than in regional factions, than hemming each other into worn out and disputable identities that obscure our common concerns.

We are in this multi-layered Appalachia and America together and — regardless of how we are supposed to be different — it looks instead like we got some real comparing of notes, some real catching up to do.

Originally from West Virginia, Crystal Cook Marshall researches and works on rural economic sector development in Central Appalachia. With a range of agricultural and other partners she currently is working on an agricultural economic sector anchor project for the Southeast to be spearheaded in Southern West Virginia. Before returning to Appalachia, Cook Marshall worked as an educator, writer, and nonprofit executive in the US and abroad. Additionally, she and her husband farm in North Carolina.

Executives from three major chemical companies — DuPont de Nemours, Inc., The Chemours Company and The 3M Company — testified for the first time to Congress about widespread contamination from the group of nonstick, fluorinated chemicals broadly called PFAS.

The so-called “forever chemicals” persist in the environment, are linked to ill health effects, and have been found in numerous water systems in the Ohio Valley.

The hearing — the third on PFAS contamination by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Environment — explored the extent to which companies that make PFAS chemicals knew about its impacts on human health and the environment and how they should be held accountable.

“These companies with us here today have screwed up and we need to hold them accountable for doing so,” said Committee Chairman Rep. Harley Rouda from California. “I hope the people representing those companies here today will admit their mistakes so that we can all move forward and achieve what I believe is our common goal: to clean up contaminated sites, stop exposing innocent people to toxic chemicals and making sure that all Americans have clean water and clean air.”

Concern over PFAS contamination has grown nationwide. The Environmental Working Group estimates the drinking water systems of more than 700 communities are contaminated with PFAS. Perfluoroalkyl chemicals were used to make nonstick products and are found in some flame retardants including firefighting foam.

“We support legislation to list PFOA and PFOS, and only those two, as hazardous substances under CERCLA. That’s further than the other companies here are willing to go today, but that’s what we believe is correct,” he said. “What we know about those chemicals is that they’re bio-persistent. That’s enough to know that there’s a clear concern for those chemicals within society at this point in time, and we feel for that reason they should be regulated.”

DuPont no longer makes PFAS chemicals. It split off its fluorinated chemicals business in 2015 to Chemours. A representative from Chemours said that company did not support such regulation. Chemours and DuPont are engaged in litigation over the split. Chemours argues DuPont misrepresented the environmental liabilities associated with PFAS chemicals.

3M’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs, Denise Rutherford, doubled down on her company’s claim that there are no negative health effects from PFAS exposure.

“When we look at that evidence there is no cause and effect for adverse human health effects at the levels we are exposed to as a general population,” she said.

That didn’t sit well with some Democrats, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who said this position goes against findings from government agencies and 3M’s own scientists.

The federal government’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says some studies in humans with PFAS exposure have shown: effects on growth, learning, and behavior of infants; an increase cholesterol levels; effects on the immune system; and an increase in the risk of cancer.

The hearing began with testimony from two attorneys whose lawsuits against DuPont and 3M unearthed thousands of internal company documents that showed both companies knew the chemicals were dangerous to human health and the environment for decades, but didn’t tell its employees or federal regulators.

From Corn Liquor to State Pride – Origins of ‘West by God Virginia’

Trish Hatfield with her husband Jim and their son Ben. Trish’s question “Where does the phrase, ‘West by God Virginia’ come from?” won West Virginia Public Broadcasting's latest Wild, Wondering West Virginia poll. Photo: Courtesy of Trish Hatfield

The latest question that won out in an online poll came to us from St. Albans resident Trish Hatfield. She asked, “Where does the phrase ‘West by God Virginia’ come from?” WVPB reached out to experts across the state and discovered one of the first times the phrase was found in a publication — and we have a good idea why it has stuck around.

“West by God Virginia” is an idiom many West Virginians know well, but its exact origins have traditionally been less well-understood.

West Virginia University linguistics professor Kirk Hazen did some digging for us into the phrase. The earliest printed version he found was in a Virginia magazine published in 1926 called “The Virginia Spectator.” It reads:

“And it is, we believe, the only way that corn can be mixed and presented to a girl — except the iron plated ones from West (by God) Virginia.”

The article was written by students at the University of Virginia who, in the middle of the prohibition, are likely alluding to making alcohol, Hazen said.

He said the quote is basically saying West Virginia women can hold their liquor.

“And the implication here is that they are accustomed to drinking homemade corn liquor,” he explained. “So, they can handle it without having to mix it up in certain concoctions.”

Hazen discovered this publication with the help from a Google Books application called Ngram Viewer. It’s an online tool that sifts through a massive digital database of millions of publications in several languages.

This screenshot of Google’s Ngram Viewer shows a peak in the published phrase “West by God Virginia” in the early 1960s — perhaps due to the centennial celebration of West Virginia in 1963. Credit: Courtesy of Kirk Hazen

Hazen said the phrase likely appeared in written form earlier than 1926, but to confirm that it would take months of sifting through physical documents, such as newspaper clippings, journals, books and magazines.

Hazen found another early publication of the phrase in 1939 in an academic article published by WVU’s English department. The phrase is found in a footnote written by Harold Wentworth. The quote explores the possible history behind “West by God Virginia.” It reads:

“Among phrases so formed is the well-known ‘West by God Virginia.’ But the expletive insertion here is more syntactical than morphological. One story of the origin of this phrase, true or not, is that a native West Virginian, irked at being called a Virginian, retorted with an intonation that can only be suggested here, ‘not Virginia, but West by God Virginia.’” — Harold Wentworth, WVU department of English, 1939

The exact origin of “West by God Virginia” as a spoken phrase is difficult to pinpoint.

Hazen points out how most spoken language is almost a living organic thing — not something that’s tracked, monitored, sorted or in databases.

But Hazen and other experts say there’s a good chance the phrase made its first oral appearance sometime after West Virginia became a state in 1863. But they say this is educated guesswork.

WVU Linguistics Professor Kirk Hazen. Hazen found one of the earliest uses of “West by God Virginia” in a publication from 1926 about corn liquor. Photo: Jesse Wright/West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Hathaway has been working on a book that explores the cultural history of the term “Mountaineer.” She points to parallels between the origins of “Mountaineer” and the phrase “West by God Virginia.”

“The first time the term Mountaineer shows up as a synonym for West Virginian is before statehood,” she noted.

Hathaway said before we separated from Virginia, there was a legislator from Harrison County who sent a letter to a newspaper in Richmond expressing annoyance that his region, western Virginia, was not being fairly represented in the Virginia Legislature.

And when he signed that letter?

“He signed it, not with his name, but as a Mountaineer,” Hathaway explained. “So, I sort of see that as being parallel to the phrase ‘West by God Virginia’ in the sense that it’s just kind of a way of reminding both ourselves and outsiders that we are distinct from Virginia, and we have a unique identity and a unique history as West Virginians.”

But none of this answers the underlying question — why did people start inserting “by God” into the name of West Virginia?

The use of “by God” in language dates back to the Anglo-Saxons, but it became commonplace in the 1600s, according to Eric Waggoner, the executive director of the West Virginia Humanities Council. Waggoner is also a retired history of English teacher.

Waggoner said “by God” has always been used as a way to emphasize something. He sees the inclusion of it in “West by God Virginia” as an expression of pride, when so much of the world perceives West Virginia in a negative light.

“There’s been a sort of narrative about West Virginia that focuses on illness; it focuses on poverty; it focuses on hard times; it focuses on this sort of thin, cultural and educational infrastructure; a lot of things that are here that need attention and that people who live here know intimately,” Waggoner explained.

He said many West Virginians are tired and fed up with this negative narrative, and by adding “by God” into our state name, our identity, it allows us to reclaim our image.

“There’s a kind of expression of pride, not just in place, but in being a person who is from this place, that ‘West by God Virginia’ seems to articulate in a very handy, in a very positive way,” he said.

Even though the exact origin of the spoken phrase may be difficult to find, Waggoner and others said today it’s often used to illustrate West Virginia as unique and separate from Virginia – that, by God, we are here, we exist and we have our own identity as West Virginians.

This article was originally published by West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

How Leaving Home Can Help Appalachia

Appalachian folk have a complicated relationship with leaving. It’s a tension that shows up in regional media all the time: In stories about small towns working to keep their young people, about Appalachian millennials leaving New York to go back home, and, more negatively, about how folks in the region should just pack up and get out of dodge.

This isn’t one of those stories. As one might surmise from the name expatalachians, I’ve already left Appalachia, and I’m not certain I’ll ever live there again. And although I’m sympathetic to helping young people stay in the region, I also understand why they choose to leave. As I’ve written about elsewhere, folks have moved into and out of Appalachia looking for a better life for over a century, and I won’t begrudge the current generation for doing the same.

Instead, I’m interested in discussing the possibilities leaving presents for Appalachia. Rather than enjoining people to stay or shaming them for going, I would argue conversations about leaving the region should instead focus on how to incorporate the Appalachian diaspora into regional conversations from where they are. Doing so successfully would not only expand our view of the Appalachian experience but also, with millions of Appalachian migrants and their descendants living outside the region, meaning we could better draw on migrants’ diverse backgrounds and resources in addressing Appalachia’s problems.

Doing this properly means wrestling with several fundamental questions. The one I would like to address here is where Appalachian migrants should fit in discussions about the region. Having left the region, to what extent can and should migrants claim a seat at the table in conversations about Appalachia, and when might their voices usefully contribute to discussions of its issues?

This question has gained increased urgency following the publication of Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance, a descendant of Appalachian migrants raised in Southwest Ohio. I don’t care much for JD Vance’s views on Appalachia, or the solutions he offers to its problems. However, in addition to critiquing Vance’s arguments, a particular line of Hillbilly Elegy criticism has focused on his lack of Appalachian credentials due to his being raised in Middletown, Ohio.

Wherever you come out on the debate, this line of criticism highlights the ambiguities Appalachian migrants face in trying to address the region. On the one hand, I personally find it hard to deny Vance’s identification as Appalachian. Although not part of Appalachia, the region where he grew up, southwest Ohio, was a major destination for Appalachian migrants in the 20th century, and the Appalachian migrant identity remains relevant there. Furthermore, I fear this kind of territorial gatekeeping threatens to exclude those in the diaspora who sincerely and legitimately identify as Appalachian.

On the other hand, Appalachian migrants, including Vance, must also recognize their unique position in speaking from outside the region. Just as a well-off professor in Morgantown has a different experience from a glassmaker in Clarksburg, so too is an Appalachian migrant’s experience of the region different from someone who stays. Those of us who’ve been outside the region for several years must accept that both we and the region may have changed since our departure, and that our experiences “abroad” mean we can no longer claim to speak as “typical Appalachians,” if we ever could.

Moreover, while we may strongly identify with the region and its people, we must also accept that, in having left, our stake in the game is different from those who remain. As such, our role and our degree of power in deciding the future of the region should be different.

Of course, this does not mean migrants have nothing to contribute. On the contrary, in return for giving up our claims to being typical Appalachians, we have gained new experiences and insights that can benefit the region if used properly. One of expatalachians’ founding goals was to create a place to share and debate these insights. Almost one year on, I’m proud of the fresh perspectives we’ve been able to inject into conversations about Appalachian history, politics, economics, environmental issues, literature, and more.

What other forms Appalachian migrant organizing may take remains an open question. In the past, migrants have created explicitly “Appalachian” organizations to agitate for better public services, state-specific clubs to commemorate their heritage, and hometown associations to network and reminisce.

As we are currently undergoing a renaissance in Appalachian organizing, diaspora activists would do well to look back on these experiences and think creatively about what kind of community they hope to create, and to what end. Whatever form it takes, for me Appalachian migrant organizing means prioritizing at least three goals.

First and foremost, in light of the Appalachian identity movement’s uncomfortable relationship with racism and exclusivism, we must strive to build a diverse and cross-sectional movement that includes Appalachian migrants of all backgrounds, regardless of race, class, indigeneity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any other factor.

Secondly, while preserving a personal connection to the region is important in Appalachian migrant organizing, we must also seek to critically address and work toward resolving problems back home, be it through scholarship, donations, economic investment, volunteering, activism, or other endeavors. These problems must include not only pressing issues affecting the region, like the opioid crisis and poverty, but also deeper structural factors that are often ignored, including the present-day realities of racism and colonization.

Finally, to return to my original point, we must organize in solidarity both with fellow migrants and with folks back home while being cognizant of our different positions. This shouldn’t just be an Appalachian migrant investment fund that seeks to “innovate” Appalachia while maintaining control. Rather, we must strive to build meaningful relationships and organizational structures between migrants and home communities so that, in seeking to promote positive change, we don’t take power away from the region and the people ultimately supposed to benefit from it.

Nicholas Brumfield is a native of Parkersburg, WV currently working in Arlington, VA. He is also a 2007 recipient of the West Virginia Golden Horseshoe for exceptional knowledge of West Virginia history. For more hot takes on Appalachia and Ohio politics, follow him on Twitter: @NickJBrumfield.